Lynne Truss: how I was seduced by a cat called Roger

In her weekly column, Lynne Truss explains why it's hard not to fall
for your creations.

Despite groaning and whining throughout the winter (“The COLD! I can’t stand this COLD!”), I realise – looking back – that I was actually quite happily occupied through all our dark and miserable spring months, writing a novella. I shan’t go into details of my little book because it won’t be published until next year. I’ll just say it is in the horror genre, and involves an evil cat called Roger with whom I am now quite seriously in love. I suppose I can add that Roger is a well-travelled and sophisticated cat who can quote Samson Agonistes, but honestly, I won’t go on about it. I will merely mention that there’s a staunchly loyal terrier dog in it, too – who is, of course, a romanticised version of the little tyke who destroyed my concentration every 15 minutes throughout the entire writing process, by insisting I get up and open the back door.

Suffice to say, I really enjoyed both the labour and the discipline of writing this book. But all the time, I did look forward to finishing. “It will be great to finish! There will be so much time!” Now that the book is delivered, however, what strikes me is not how many hours there are in a day, but how few. This is the same perception people have when they retire, of course. “How did I ever have time to go to work?” they exclaim. Mornings flash past. Time actually expanded when I was working on my story; now it has cruelly shrunk. The annoying thing is that now I’m under less pressure, and would happily play doorman for the dog all day, it’s warm enough for the door to be left open permanently, and I see him only at mealtimes.

I mentioned earlier that I fell in love with Roger the cat – but this is the first time I’ve admitted it. I don’t know how much it happens to other writers, but it had definitely been my habit to fall in love with characters in my own books. In my first novel, I fell in love with the quite minor character known as “Gordon’s dad” – a retired firefighter running a Honiton b&b called “Dunquenchin”. Gordon’s dad seemed rather manly, and there was some detailed stuff about him being handy with a fire-axe that clearly spoke to something primitive within me. In my next novel, I fell in love with the Victorian phrenologist Lorenzo Fowler (based on a real person), who was again quite earthy, and famously good with his hands. And in my third, I fell in love with a Swedish man called Stefan who spoke over-ambitious idiomatic English (bless him). He said things like, “This is a rum go, Belinda. Honest to goodness, I feel I may blow my top.”

Of course, I assumed the pattern would be broken when I wrote a book about punctuation – but oddly enough, it wasn’t, because I fell in love with the colon, and I honestly didn't see that coming. But while puzzling out (to my own satisfaction, anyway) the differences between the colon and the semicolon, I realised with a thrill in my loins that the colon was the chap for me. There is something (again!) compellingly down-to-earth about the colon. It is honest, and handsome, and it knows who it is. Romantically speaking, I have met a lot of namby-pamby semicolons in my life; now that I think about it, I spent several misguided years with (basically) an ellipsis. The tragedy, of course, is that a true colon wouldn’t give me a second glance: I’m too lightweight. He would dismiss me as a mere asterisk, at best.

I feel a bit bereft without my novella. But at least there is good news: the more books I write, the more I find out about my ideal man. By a process of inference, you see, I can now tell he is a bearded Victorian, with intense green eyes and a beautiful tail, who is a good father, and emphatically good at linking (but also separating) two parts of a sentence that are causally connected. When not expertly feeling bumps on heads, he invokes the verse of Milton while being good with tools, pointing the reader’s attention forward, and purring, “You are coming a cropper, Belinda; and I will not fiddle while Rome burns.” Well, hooray. It’s a slow process, admittedly; but with each book, his image comes clearer. By the time I’m 90, I’ll really have nailed him down.